Parnell and Kitty O’Shea – a Sussex love story

Edwin Lerner

“Yes, that’s the grave most people want to see,” said the lady at Littlehampton Cemetery when I asked where Katharine O’Shea was buried.

She was known as Kate to her family and as Kitty to history, a name she would have hated as it was slang for a woman of loose morals.

Kitty O'Shea's grave in Littlehampton Cemetery

I had read a great deal about her and, having moved to the town, felt it was time to pay my respects.

By her grave was a plaque with the words of her husband and lover Charles Stewart Parnell: ‘I will give my life to Ireland, but to you I give my love.’

Parnell was the leader of the Irish Home Rule movement who campaigned for Irish independence.

He was the Alex Salmond of his day, a man with the ability to inspire his followers and a burning belief in independence for his people from British rule.

She was the dutiful if estranged wife of an Irish MP called William O’Shea.

Although they were a married couple in name only she dutifully hosted dinner parties to help her husband’s career.

Parnell was always invited, always accepted but never showed up and so she went to confront him in Westminster one fateful day in 1880.

The effect was immediate and within months the two had begun a relationship and were living as man and wife in her home in Eltham.

She bore him three children while still married to O’Shea and possibly a further stillborn son after their brief marriage in 1891.

Parnell’s health was broken by this time as he campaigned to win back the support he had lost as a result of the scandal that arose from the revelation of his affair with the wife of a colleague and fellow MP.

He spoke at an open air rally in Galway but caught a chill and died soon afterwards in Katharine’s arms.